of print, and Atavist Books was not the only new publishing venture to discover the need to re-invent the wheel and build a print business if they wanted to sustain their digital publishing programme.5
One could perhaps say, however, that Atavist Books suffered from a particular technical problem: it was creating digitally elaborate ebooks that required the reader to download and sign in to another application – the Atavist app – in order to buy and read the ebook, and this multi-step structure was just too complicated and off-putting for users. In the age of the iPad, why not just create the book itself as an app that can be purchased and downloaded directly from the App Store – that would be much simpler, surely. Wouldn’t that stand a better chance of success?
Ebooks as apps
Tom at Mansion House experimented a lot with app development, both at Mansion House and at the small, cutting-edge indie for which he previously worked. The procedure he followed at both houses was pretty much the same: come up with an idea for an app, either on his own or in discussion with one of the in-house editors, scope out the project and then put it out to tender either to an agency or to an app developer. Tom developed a good relationship with a small developer, ‘BirchTree’, to whom he gave a lot of his app development work. BirchTree is a small operation, two guys in their early thirties, self-taught programmers who worked briefly for a games company, became disillusioned, left, set up on their own and now work from home. One day, one of them got a phone call out of the blue from someone at a publishing company asking him if they’d be interested in developing an app with a scientist. That was 2010, shortly after the iPad had been launched. They’d done lots of iOS stuff, so they knew they could build an app – yes, they were interested. ‘He asked me how much it was going to cost and I was like, hmmm, I just picked a number out of the air, I said £20,000. And he said, yeah, that sounds fine, that sounds about right.’ So the deal was done. The publisher, Tom, was then working for a small indie, and the app was for a digital-only publication by a young American scientist about the future of the internet. The text didn’t exist in advance – he wrote the text as the app was being developed. It took the two guys at BirchTree about two months to produce the app. They built a unique non-linear navigational interface and enhanced the author’s text with interactive 3D models, video, images and other content pulled from the internet. It was available from the App Store for £4.99. Tom was happy with the way the app came out and had nothing but praise for the two guys at BirchTree (‘they’re fucking brilliant’) but he had to confess that sales were disappointing – ‘you get to 1,000 copies and that’s about it.’ With development costs of £20,000 and revenue after Apple’s commission of less than £4,000, that’s a serious loss – and that’s without taking account of any fees or royalties paid to the author.
It isn’t always like that, however. Tom described another app he did, this time for one of the commercial imprints of Mansion House. The author was a well-known scientist who had written many books of popular science. His new book was a lavishly illustrated book aimed at showing young people how science can explain natural phenomena. Tom and his publishing colleagues at Mansion House came up with the idea of doing an app that could be released at the same time as the book was published. They put the project out to tender at various agencies and developers, and those who were interested pitched their ideas to them. Tom and his colleagues decided to go with an agency, ‘Phantom’, that worked across different platforms and industries and had an in-house team of app developers. They told Phantom that they had a fixed amount of money for the project, £40,000, and they needed the app ready to be released by the publication date of the book. This sum was considerably less than Phantom would have needed to develop the kind of app they had in mind – they would normally have wanted at least twice that amount. But they liked the project and could see benefits in developing their collaboration with publishers, so they were willing to be flexible on the terms. They agreed a deal where the publisher put up £40,000 to cover the production costs, and the agency took a share of the revenues. Phantom had three months to deliver. They put five people full-time on the project and brought in specialists and freelancers when they needed them. They used the text from the book and supplemented it with specially created illustrations, animations, audio and video clips of the author and a variety of interactive activities and games. The main technical challenge for Phantom was to find a way to link large amounts of text to a single image – they were using the entire text of the book in the app, not an abbreviated version. In a large-format book, you can fit a lot of text around a single illustration, but you can’t do this on a tablet screen in landscape mode. Phantom’s solution was to develop different layers of content so that images and text would move at different speeds as you swiped the screen. It was a technique they borrowed from game design, where it’s used to create the illusion of depth – for example, clouds in the background move slowly while things in the foreground move quickly, giving the illusion of depth. But none of their developers had done this before, so they had to invent processes on the fly and then go back and fix the things that didn’t work. Despite these challenges, they delivered on time and the app was released a week after the hardcover edition was published in September 2011, available from the App Store at £9.99 and $13.99.
This one worked. ‘It followed a very traditional kind of app sales curve’, explained Steve, the project manager at Phantom. ‘Huge initial spike and then a long tail of ongoing sales. So we sold 15,000, 20,000 in the first couple of months, and then a similar amount again over the next couple of years.’ In total, the app sold around 35,000 copies, about half of which were in North America, a quarter in the UK and a quarter in the rest of the world. ‘Everyone involved made money, which was a huge surprise’, added Steve. It’s easy to see why Steve said that – the maths are simple. Once you’ve taken off Apple’s 30 per cent commission, the net revenue is around £230,000, or $360,000. With production costs pegged at £40,000, this app was a resounding commercial success. What explains its success?
Steve’s answer is that of a software engineer who was focused on the user experience:
A lot of apps at the time did things because you could, not because you should. The process of picking up a book and getting lost in it was missing from them. They had lots of ‘look at me moments’ – press this, hit that. One of our guiding principles was that when you pick up a book and start to read, the interface disappears – you’re just lost in the content. So we wanted to apply that to the digital book, and I think we did that in a smart way. I felt like we managed to blend light-touch animation and textual content and make a serious scientific work that was still a book reading experience. It wasn’t a game, it wasn’t really an app, it was a book.
While there is undoubtedly some truth in Steve’s explanation, the stylish technical design and smooth interface of the app are only part of the story. A good part of the app’s success can almost certainly be attributed to factors that are linked more directly to traditional aspects of trade publishing: release of the app to coincide with the publication of the print edition of the book; a large marketing budget for the book and the app together, and an intensive promotion campaign by the publisher; and an author with a high international profile and a strong track record of successful trade books. While the app was a very innovative product that built upon but went well beyond the printed book, its success was attributable in part to the traditional structures and processes of the publishing industry – take away those structures and processes, release this as a standalone app without a simultaneous book publication and the marketing budget and promotion campaign that went with it, and it might well have performed less impressively.
As these two examples show, much of the activity in this area is what we could describe as hybrid publishing – that is, a traditional trade publisher, whether a small cutting-edge indie or a large corporate house or something in between, experimenting with innovative forms of publishing by commissioning the development of an app, to be released either as a standalone product or as an ebook in which text taken from a printed book is reworked, enhanced and/or supplemented in various ways. In hybrid publishing of this kind, innovation is heavily dependent on traditional book publishers who are seeking to experiment with digital publishing forms, explore new possibilities and test the market
